Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis, pt. 5: ミドリ

Starting sometime last year, I started really getting into Japanese music. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I had always thought I hated singing in Japanese. Turns out I don’t! In the night threads for the following week, I’ll write a little about each of my favorite artists that I’ve discovered, and share a streaming album for you to dutifully ignore.

Midori (ミドリ) was an influential jazz-punk band formed in 2003 and disbanding in 2010. They’re absolutely fantastic. Their most notable asset is Mariko Gotō (後藤まりこ) on vocals. She’s an absolute force of nature on the mic, yelping, screaming, and generally having more ecstatic energy in one show than I will be able to muster in my entire life. Let me demonstrate with the encore to their final performance with Gotō bleeding from the head.

Their most famous album is probably 『あらためまして、はじめまして、ミドリです。』 (Aratamemashite, hajimemashite, Midori desu), or perhaps that’s just the one I see most often because it has boobs on the cover. It would be nice to get that on vinyl, the only album they released available in that format, but it’s outrageously priced at $1,200 on Discogs. Anyway, good place to start, but I’ll obscure the cover so you’re not subjected to nipples.